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Rayman has always been a pretty successful series, originally conceived on PC and Playstation, the series has spawned sequels on everything from Gameboy Color, to Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox, and Gameboy Advance. Now that Nokia's powerful little handheld has hit the market, UbiSoft and Gameloft have teamed up to bring the limbless hero over to the N-Gage.

Rayman 3 for the N-Gage is a port of the successful and very fun Gameboy Advance game, which takes Rayman back to his hay day of side-scrolling platform adventure. The game follows somewhat the same storyline as its console brother, in that Rayman's big blue friend Globox has swallowed a dark lum and disappeared, and Rayman has to find him before he gets into trouble! The portable story strays a bit from the console version in that it seems Rayman's nemesis from the second game, Razor Beard, is still at large and wants to harness the power of the dark lum for his own diabolic means. Needless to say, our friend Rayman has his hands full, and it's off for some adventure!

Throughout Rayman 3, you'll find yourself mostly doing a lot of platform jumping, vine climbing, and the like. Probably 2/3 of the game is platform involved, while the last 1/3 is made up of boss battles and the occasional enemy during the levels. Rayman still has most of his abilities from the console version: he can use his hair as a helicopter, throw his fists, latch on to purple lums and use them as pitfall-like vines. After every world (4 in total, despite the boxed claim of 8) Rayman will learn a new ability that will help him along his journey, and the game does a good job of easing you into the gameplay elements. Despite what you may think about an almost strictly platforming game, Rayman 3 is actually pretty difficult. You'll be spending many an hour trying to get past some of the games tougher levels. The levels are made up of your usual platform game stereotypes, such as the volcanic level, the happy grassy world, etc. Each level is bright and vibrant, and has a very distinct feel among the rest of the levels and is full of challenges to keep you busy. Throughout the level, you will find numerous yellow lums, along with small cages that you can collect and smash to help you 100% the level.

Like most N-Gage games to be released as of late, Rayman 3 boasts multiplayer over bluetooth connection. The multiplayer modes are Tag, Capture the Flag, and Burglar. Tag is exactly what it sounds like: a game of tag between 2-4 Raymans in a small, enclosed level. Capture the Flag is your standard CTF mode; where each player has a flag and they try to catch the others flag and take it back their post. Burglar is kind of a reverse tag, where you have to try to be the first person to be 'it' for a total of one minute. Overall, the multiplayer modes are fun, and offer some enjoyable games, but they just don't stand up to the single player game in terms of long-term enjoyment.

Visually, Rayman is bright, bold and very colorful. Every area in the game is lush and full of detail and challenge. Rayman himself animates great, and fluently, while some of the enemies in the game have a couple animations that are a bit choppy, but for the most part, everyone in the game animates well. There is a rather small number of enemies in the game, so there's a bit of repetition in the battle elements, but for the most part, you'll be too busy trying having fun with the rest of the game to gripe about it much.

As far as the games audio goes, everything is fun and light-hearted. The tunes in the various levels have that kind of bumpy happy feel that you'd expect from a platform game's soundtrack. Rayman never has too much to say, and since there isn't much in-game dialogue anyway, you don't really notice it much. The audio is good, but it doesn't seem to have the same level of polish that the rest of the game does.

All in all, Rayman 3 provides an enjoyable single player experience, with some fun, if not shallow multiplayer components. The gameplay is fun, tough and stays fresh from beginning to end, offering one of the funniest games on the N-Gage platform to date.